Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Dylane Doerr’s skin is the even brown of a man who works outdoors, not the splotchy tan of the weekend hedonist. He unscrews his thermos of coffee with slow deliberation, pulls his orange marker flags out of the earth one by one. He’s not a man who guesses, or yanks at things, or rushes.
Doerr runs his own construction company in Waterloo, Ill., and he’s got a reputation for building things solid. He and his wife, a schoolteacher, live in a little white farmhouse with a working well and an old-fashioned scarecrow in the vegetable garden. There’s a mansion next door, and it baffles him; he can’t quite see why anybody would need so many rooms.
He doesn’t waste time on small mysteries, though. He has larger ones to puzzle over.
About 25 years ago, a guy gave Doerr some copper rods that he could use to find utility trenches. In the construction business, those long-buried phone, sewer, and electrical lines can knock all of your plans off kilter. Doerr nodded his thanks and threw the rods in the back of his truck, then didn’t think much more about them. But three years ago, a friend told him about an abandoned cemetery, its tombstones littering the woods. He pulled out the copper rods, which he’d had luck using from time to time to find trenches, and as he walked, they kept crossing and opening. It turned out that there were far more bodies buried there than the tombstones indicated—139 at least.
Intrigued, Doerr started talking to old-timers about dowsing and water witching. He read up on magnetism, found out there was an American Society of Dowsers, didn’t join. He kept testing the rods, practicing all over Monroe County. He’d put an orange flag in the ground wherever his rods crossed, then keep walking. He found sites where old churches had stood; graves that had lost their markers; underground water.
“When you are over something that has been dug—a hole, a trench—from what I understand, there’s magnetic lines in the earth, and when you dig, you break those lines,” he says. “I’ve read that’s how migratory birds keep from getting lost: There’s something in their brains that picks up magnetism.” (They sense Earth’s magnetic fields and use the data as a compass.)
Doerr confided his new interest to his uncle, Merrill Prange, who recently retired as treasurer of Monroe County. Prange promptly blindfolded him and had him dowse in the historic cemetery in Fults, Ill. “He found the edges of every one of the graves with 100 percent accuracy, and he was probably 95 percent accurate on male or female,” concedes Prange, who’s still not convinced you can dowse for gender.
“I’ve been right about 960 times out of 1,000,” Doerr says now. “And old headstones fall down and get stood up in the wrong place, and in some graves there’s a mother and child buried together.”
Back in 1977, the U.S. Geological Survey officially declared that dowsing had no scientific basis and deserved no further study. Martin Luther had gone further, proclaiming it the work of the devil. Nonetheless, it’s a 9,000-year-old tradition, and it just won’t go away. On February 15, 1946, Albert Einstein wrote in a letter to Herman Peisach, “I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction this is, however, unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.”
Another possibility is that dowsers are just good practical geologists with unusually keen powers of observation, detecting subtle differences in the color of the soil or the root structure of plants.
Another, closer to the beaded fringe, is that they have extrasensory perception, or ESP.
Doerr’s never been the fanciful type, but he’s sure his mind is involved somehow. He has to ask the right question mentally: If he’s looking for the basement of an early structure, his rods show that outline, and if he’s trying to find graves that were dug later on the same site, his rods cross and open to indicate separate smaller burials. He swears he just keeps his elbows close to his sides and his hands as steady as he can.
“Your mind does have some control over your muscles,” he says, “but if I’m doing something big, I try not to look back. I just put down the flags. And then I turn around, and the line’s straight.”
He slides quarter-inch copper tubing over the L-shaped rods to make handles, so he’s only holding the tubes and the rods can swivel freely.
“I try to prove this wrong,” he says, “and if I can prove it totally wrong, I’ll quit. But I can go somewhere and find something, and a week later go back and find it again. Five weeks later, six months later…it’s still there.”
Maybe he’s got a magnetic personality, I suggest lightly. He stops to light a Marlboro and draws deep. “I’ve never had my magnetism checked,” he says. “It happens, though; some people can’t wear watches. And there’s what they call stray electricity in the air around big transformers…” He says once, lightning struck near him, and his hands clenched around the concrete chute he was using; he couldn’t pry them off. He shakes his head, takes another drag on his cigarette. Nothing quite explains this.
Last summer, down in the Bottom, he saw a couple of guys—archaeology grad students, as it turned out—walking back and forth holding a machine. It was a magnetometer, and they told him they were mapping the field because it was a significant Indian area.
When they returned a few months later, he said, “You know what’s there now. Can I come and find it?” Granted, the site’s about 1,050 years old, and it’s river ground, the soil shifting like sand; he wasn’t sure he’d find anything. But he took out his rods. “There’s something here,” he says he told them. “Something here, too, the same size… A circular pit here… A huge structure here.” When they laughed, he thought he’d blown it. But he says they told him they were impressed: The first two structures were there and were the same size, and the pit was there and was circular—and they hadn’t even mapped the huge structure.
“The machine doesn’t pick up weaker signals,” Doerr says. He can’t help sounding a little smug. The expense of magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar stacks high against scrap copper and a 50-cent tube. Alas, his success can’t be confirmed; the archaeologist whose name and contact information he saved could not be reached for comment.
At Eagle Cliff-Miles Cemetery, crooked gray headstones fill a shady clearing, the land sloping gently downhill toward a sudden drop and dramatic view. Eagles used to perch on this cliff and scan for prey. Today, the cliff overlooks a patchwork of brown and spring green, Illinois Bottom farmland.
Doerr walks a row of graves, his work boots damp from the dewy grass, his copper rods opening and crossing regular as a metronome. “Now here’s where it gets weird,” he warns me. I stare, unblinking, at his big fingers curved around the rod handles. I see nothing suspicious. Once the rods have crossed over a grave, he drops one rod and watches the other, waiting.
It bends—to the left over a man’s grave, to the right over a woman’s. Left over Amos, right over Nellie. Left over Joseph, right over Lucy.
The next step’s even weirder, he warns. When he changes what he’s looking for, starts thinking “basement,” his rods open and cross in a different rhythm. He bends to plant an orange flag every time they cross, and as I watch, the outline of a large rectangle emerges.
“That’s the part where people turn and walk away,” he says. “But the reason I know this works? Nothing in nature is square. Veins of water, rock formations…nothing’s square. But if you just go along like this, things line up at 90 degrees.”
Old graves, of course, are smaller and less uniform. At Eagle Cliff-Miles Cemetery, records indicate hundreds of burials that are still unmarked. Doerr dowsed the outline of one possible grave. He had his doubts, because it was so short, but he started digging and hit a tree root. When he tried to chop it away, his axe clanged against a buried gravestone.
He took the stone home and gently cleaned it. It belongs to a 2-year-old girl, Francis Mulcaster, who died in 1876. “We loved this tender little one,” the inscription read.
In late 2010, Doerr was named one of the cemetery’s three trustees, and he spends about 21 full, sweaty days every summer mowing it. This past September, he and another volunteer removed every vulgar smear of black Rust-Oleum—the most recent graffiti to deface the marble mausoleum tucked into the cliff.
It was built in 1858–59 for Stephen Miles, who died in December and spent three months rotting in his parlor—apparently the maid dusted his coffin faithfully—while builders waited for the ground to thaw so they could finish his final resting place. His wife soon joined him in another of the 56 crypts, followed by other relatives and “Anny, a pious, honest and upright colored servant,” as her inscription read. By the 1970s, vandals and devil-worshippers had desecrated the mausoleum, covering the Italian marble with graffiti and dragging out the coffins. On one occasion, cult members burned bodies, allegedly in an attempt to raise
the dead.
Now Doerr and the other trustees have put up surveillance cameras. Next, he wants to rebuild the crumbling stonewall that flanks the once-grand mausoleum.
“You got relatives up there?” people ask.
“No,” he says, “but somebody does.”
Last November, for Find Piggott’s Fort Day, historical societies in Columbia, Ill., invited anybody with ideas or information to a community forum. They knew that in 1783, Capt. James Piggott—who’d fought with George Washington—led 17 Anglo-American families to a spot at the foot of the Illinois bluffs, right where Grand Ruisseau (now Carr) Creek emerged. People in Columbia had always assumed the stone footings of a barn built in the 1820s marked the former fort’s site, because the barn had been built with timbers that university experts dated from 1780 to 1800.
Doerr squinted up at the bluffs and shook his head. “They wouldn’t have put it there; the Kickapoo [Indians] could’ve shot straight down on them.”
Doerr pored over old maps and aerial photographs. The morning of Christmas Eve, he drove to the site with his copper rods and started walking the airstrip of Sackman Field Airport and the adjoining cabbage field.
“I didn’t look back,” he says, “and then when I did turn around, I’d marked a perfectly straight line with a 90-degree turn. You start putting flags in it, and it takes a shape, and you pull all the flags out and it’s gone again.” That night he called his brother and said, “I built a fort in a day and tore it back down!” He was trying to keep it light, but he couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice.
Dennis Patton, Columbia High School’s retired principal, asked for a live demo.
“Being a science teacher, I was skeptical of this process,” Patton explains. “So I went out there and watched him work, and it just gave me cold chills. When he would step off an area, those rods would open up. Through his preliminary efforts, we made a pretty detailed drawing, and it matched [local historian] Carl Baldwin’s description of what the fort would have looked like.”
Piggott’s Fort was one of the first American settlements in the great American Bottom. Piggott lived there 12 years, during which time he established the first ferry across the Mississippi.
Doerr’s next step was to convince Dwayne Scheid, an archaeologist from the Illinois State Archaeology Survey who’d come to the meeting. “He said, ‘My colleagues don’t know if we want to take on a project on the word of a guy with two rods,’” Doerr says. “And I said, ‘I don’t blame them.’ So I took him out and showed him where the walls and gates must be.”
“It’s not scientific,” says Scheid, “but I’m willing to test his idea. If it’s as deep as Mr. Doerr says it is, ground-penetrating radar wouldn’t pick it up anyway.”
Excavation will begin this summer, as soon as the cabbage crop comes in.
